Intersil
More info
- Creator
- Jean Hoerni
- Released
- 1967
- Type
- Semiconductor company
A much-traded chipmaker that managed to build both a PDP-8 on a chip and early Wi-Fi.
Founded in 1967 by Jean Hoerni, one of the traitorous eight and inventor of the planar process at Fairchild. Intersil was early to CMOS, and its IM6100 of 1975 was a PDP-8-compatible processor on a single chip – DEC's minicomputer in a low-power package.
General Electric bought the company in 1981 and sold it on to Harris in 1988. When Harris spun off its semiconductor arm in 1999 the Intersil name came back, and its PRISM chipsets sat inside a large share of early 802.11b Wi-Fi cards. Renesas acquired Intersil in 2017.